Abuse

There should be no punishment of children at all, period. Any questions?

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I see a few folks are liking my posts here enough to want ot follow me, and that is terrific, but I must warn you – I’m running out of things to say already!

The title here states my position, and there is some elaboration in the posts, but I don’t see any comments, no questions or arguments. That surprises me a little . . . OK, a lot. On other sites, I get a lot of outraged comments and arguments.

I would like to maybe hear from anyone who thinks my idea here needs some more explanation, perhaps there are aspects of child-rearing that need some clarification in terms of punishing or not. I’d love questions, objections, a chance to talk about my favourite topic, so feel free, please. Have at me.

Punishment of Children as Domestic Abuse . . .

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Punishment of Children as Domestic Abuse . . .

Authors: (of the above graphic, as well as the original descriptions of the phases of the cycles below, not in ALL CAPS) Melinda Smith, M.A., and Jeanne Segal, Ph.D.  Last updated: December 2012.

Well, I’m just throwing this out there. Honestly, I haven’t spent the time and thought on this that I have with most of this project. It’s a bit of a reach perhaps, but one may have to admit there are some parallels between the domestic violence pattern and the pattern nearly all of us have been part of as normally punished children. It makes sense that any mental gymnastics one would use to justify dishing out unpleasantness on people, and making one’s self believe that from this bad can come good might follow a predictable form, so I’ve added, in CAPS (or in red CAPS), the ‘other’ cycle of domestic abuse to the above graphic, the Cycle of Parental Punishment:

THE CYCLE OF VIOLENCE IN PARENTAL PUNISHMENT

The cycle of violence in domestic abuse

PARENTAL PUNISHMENT FALLS INTO A COMMON PATTERN, OR CYCLE OF VIOLENCE:

Domestic abuse falls into a common pattern, or cycle of violence:

Abuse – Your abusive partner lashes out with aggressive, belittling, or violent behavior.  The abuse is a power play designed to show you “who is boss.”

PUNISHMENT – YOUR PUNISHING PARENT “IMPOSES SOME UNPLEASANTNESS” – THREATS, INTIMIDATION, CONFISCATION OF YOUR PROPERTY, OR RESTRICTION OF YOUR FREEDOMS. IT IS A POWER PLAY, INTENDED TO TEACH YOU RESPECT FOR THEM AND ALL AUTHORITY.

Guilt – After abusing you, your partner feels guilt, but not over what he’s done.  He’s more worried about the possibility of being caught and facing consequences for his abusive behavior.

GUILT – AFTER PUNISHING YOU, YOUR PARENT FEELS GUILT, BUT NEVER QUESTIONS THEIR USE OF PUNISHMENT. THEY’RE MORE WORRIED THAT YOU’LL RESENT THEM, THAT YOU WON’T LOVE THEM ANYMORE, OR ALSO THAT OTHERS WILL FIND OUT ABOUT THE FIGHTING IN THE FAMILY.

Excuses – Your abuser rationalizes what he or she has done.  The person may come up with a string of excuses or blame you for the abusive behavior—anything to avoid taking responsibility.

EXPLANATIONS – YOUR PARENT RATIONALIZES WHAT THEY HAVE DONE, RESTATING YOUR MISDEED AND EXPLAINING WHY YOU NEEDED THE PUNISHMENT, AND WHY IT’S GOOD FOR YOU. THEY MAY SAY THEY DIDN’T ENJOY IT, BUT THAT YOU MADE IT NECESSARY.

“Normal” behavior — The abuser does everything he can to regain control and keep the victim in the relationship.  He may act as if nothing has happened, or he may turn on the charm.  This peaceful honeymoon phase may give the victim hope that the abuser has really changed this time.

NORMAL BEHAVIOUR – YOUR PARENT DOES EVERYTHING THEY CAN TO REGAIN CONTROL AND KEEP UP THE APPEARANCE OF A HAPPY, HEALTHY PARENT-CHILD RELATIONSHIP. THEY MAY ACT AS THOUGH IT NEVER HAPPENED, OR THEY MAY BECOME ESPECIALLY SWEET FOR A TIME. THIS PHASE LETS THE CHILD KNOW THAT WHEN HE BEHAVES, THE PARENT IS HAPPY AND NON-VIOLENT.

Fantasy and planning – Your abuser begins to fantasize about abusing you again.  He spends a lot of time thinking about what you’ve done wrong and how he’ll make you pay.  Then he makes a plan for turning the fantasy of abuse into reality.

CONSISTENCY AND DENIAL – HAVING EXPLAINED TO YOU AND THEMSELVES THE REASON FOR THE PUNISHMENT, AND SATISFIED THAT YOU’RE BOTH HAPPY AND LOVING ONE ANOTHER AGAIN, YOUR PARENT HAS REASSURED HIMSELF THAT HE’S DONE THE RIGHT THING, AND IS OVER HIS MOMENTARY REMORSE AND READY TO DO IT AGAIN, THE NEXT TIME YOU MAKE IT NECESSARY.

Set-up – Your abuser sets you up and puts his plan in motion, creating a situation where he can justify abusing you.

VIGILANCE AND CONTROL – YOUR PARENT PLACES A LOT OF RULES AND RESTRICTIONS ON YOUR BEHAVIOUR AND WAITS FOR THE NEXT TIME YOU BREAK ONE, SO THEY CAN HAVE A CHANCE TO PUNISH YOU AGAIN, AND SO “TEACH YOU HOW TO BEHAVE” AND “INSTILL SOME RESPECT FOR AUTHORITY IN YOU.”

Food for thought . . .

Abuse with an Excuse – Doctrine in short form . . . Part #2

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B. The Cognitive Damage

1. Punishments/penalties are all artificial consequences, contrived ones. It is not really a simple ‘cause and effect’ phenomenon when some active agent chooses the effect for a cause. In this way, our contrived consequences are substituted for the real world, natural consequences a child may experience when he explores or misbehaves, and therefore any real world learning experience is circumvented. This is the function that is in play when we note, through many good studies that corporal punishment hampers cognitive development.

When standardized punishments are substituted for the nearly infinite number of random real world consequences of childhood exploration as well as misdeeds, the vast and varied learning that may have happened is severely lessened, and the only learning that does happen is artificial and contrived. This is definitive of serious arrested cognitive development. It follows that the resulting impairment of thought will vary, of course with many factors, but certainly with the degree to which a child is controlled. A child who has more real world learning experience will be better able to process information regarding the real world than one whose learning years held few real world mistakes and learning opportunities.

2. Of course, parents need to protect their children from extreme danger. Life and limb certainly take priority over individual missed opportunities for real world learning. These safety hazards are not the most common situations parents and children face, however, and this is not a valid argument for the use of punishment generally.

Some may say that children need to be punished to learn to obey in every situation, so that their obedience will be guaranteed when there does arise a hazard, a real threat to life and limb, that a child needs to be conditioned to obey so that he may be ordered away from a street or a river and will comply immediately. This, I would say is a valid argument only if this sort of conditioning didn’t have a serious down-side. I believe that the damages that result from punishing, and certainly from the all-encompassing environment of punishment that this argument implies, brings a terrible cost also, up to and including a considerable cost of life and limb, in the form of violence, crime and suicide, along with the many social costs that are not as visible, that result from the cognitive hobbling that is produced by these methods.

Following Your Heart

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Sometimes, although the belief in punishing is present, people’s hearts aren’t in it, that is to say, many parents don’t punish, or at least don’t punish much, despite sharing the normal belief in it, despite that they don’t condemn their own parents punishing practices. Many simply don’t have the stomach for it, which is a good thing. Many of today’s parents have intuitively seen through the sham, even if not many have in a cerebral way.

I personally know of a family, which has a lot of the characteristics of a classic abusive situation, where there was drug abuse by both of the parents, with alcoholism and much anger, frustration, and ambivalence regarding his own parents on the part of the father, and co-dependent issues. The kids, though, seem to have survived it fairly well, at least there doesn’t appear to be substance issues or violence; they are in their early twenties now and seem to be making lives for themselves. In many ways, it appears that the marriage is a clone of the father’s parents’ marriage. There is the dad’s alcoholism, frustration and anger, and there is the mom’s co-dependence and compensation (some would say ‘over-compensation’) strategy, but the newer generation of kids seems to have suffered much less damage. The kids of the previous generation in the father’s family were pretty messed up. The difference is in the use of punishment, as far as I can see.

Whenever I mention this book to the younger mother, I get in the usual arguments, arguments I get a lot on this subject; she doesn’t see either that anyone punishes, or that there’s anything wrong with parents wanting or getting it all their way, depending on the particular point we’re discussing – but she never hit her kids, and hardly grounded or anything. There may have been a certain amount of compensation or co-dependence in that, an attempt to provide the kids a nicer life than they got from their dad, but he was forbidden any sort of physical punishing as well, that was her line in the sand. The upshot seems to be, despite all the typical elements of abusiveness – he was verbally and emotionally horribly abusive – there was very little in the way of punishment. That is the contrast from one generation in this family to the next, while the grandmother denies her punishing, or denies any extreme punishing, she punished, and her kids were badly damaged. In the younger generation, while the mother professes not being opposed to parental rule and the parents’ right and duty to do it, she didn’t punish, and the kids appear to have survived much better. All the while, the grandfather and the father appear identical, except the younger man was forbidden to use physical punishment.

This case seems to make a very clear case that the alcoholism and the verbal and emotional abuse being common, the outcomes were very different, and the difference was in the use of punishment. With no punishing, the children seem to have survived an abusive situation, while the generation that were punished show all the expected signs of abuse.

This is anecdotal, to be sure . . .

The Hand that Rocks the Cradle Rules the World.

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The ‘legitimate’ abuse that has a thousand names, punishment, correction, discipline, consequences, training, spanking, timeouts, quiet time, penance, detention, etc., this practice is done by nearly everyone. People of many races, religions, nationalities, creeds, sexualities, income levels, education levels, and both genders, most people hold with punishment’s basic, unquestioned, unacknowledged premise, that you can improve people, their behaviour, their development, their character – by hurting them. By somehow making life less pleasant for them when they stray from the caregivers’ idea of what is done and what is not.
Now, for me, this seems to contradict a great deal of psychological thinking, which developed, to some degree, by tracing suffering people’s lives to the unpleasantness that damaged them to the point of seeking a doctor’s help, in the early days, damaged them to the point of being committed to a sanatorium. For a dysfunctional patient, often after other causes had been explored, physical ailments, etc., often the next, or maybe last logical step might be the psychoanalyst, and psychoanalysis has had some success, making connections between mental trauma and social dysfunction.
Of these two apparently opposing ideas – punishment and psychology – the latter seems the more logical, dare I say, scientific. So with this argument, and the ones in the preceding chapters, I’m going to push on, taking as a given at least as my premise, that unpleasantness, only different from trauma by a matter of degree, damages people rather than improving them.
OK, the use of punishment has looked like it works, you punish someone and the unwanted behaviour appears to stop – but does it? Do we think a punished child becomes a model citizen forever afterwards? Do we think a punished adult ceases his criminal behaviour and goes on as a saint? I don’t think even the most energetic of my unconvinced audience thinks that, do they? So again, unpleasantness makes people worse, less functional, rather than improving them. Having said that, I want to extrapolate that whomsoever punishes a person the most, does the most damage.
If one’s parents are active participants in the practice, the culture of punishment, then I feel I must say, that the parent who does the more parenting, very often the most punishing, must be the parent causing the most unpleasantness, the most trauma, the most damage. And, sorry to say, in my world, probably in most of the world, it’s Mom doing most of the parenting. Certainly many fathers are responsible for horrible trauma, perhaps the more serious punishments are administered by the father in some families, but basically, day-to-day parenting and punishing, falls to mothers. This is especially true during the earliest years of the child’s life. Uninvolved fathers are bad in many ways, of course. Neglect is a form of abuse, there is the lack of male modelling, but there is the other side too: if parenting means punishing to the mother, and if she overdoes it, then Dad’s neglect is downright dangerous, he can be rightly accused of not protecting his kids from some hands-on abuse. Also, if he’s not helping, then the mother can become stressed out, also not a good thing for a parent who already thinks punishing kids, that is, hurting kids, is good for them. So yes, that is what I’m saying: in the culture of punishment, your mother is probably doing you more harm than your father. Dad’s no saint, don’t get me wrong, he’s letting her do it, often participating . . . but the myth that needs busting here, is Mom’s sainthood. Having said THAT, the other ramifications of this are the more important thing. Blame is even, one does it, one allows it, and sometimes they trade off. I don’t make this point to place blame; this isn’t about the trauma of children.
This principle, that mothers raise the children, that mothers punish the children, this is the root of misogyny, the root of violence against women. We love our mothers, we love our system of punishment, we all hold the family unit as a sacred, ancient tradition, but that is the surface of it all. That is only what we say, what we think we feel, but the dark side is this:
We all know who punished us, we know who damaged us. Violence against women is a trend, a tendency, it is far more prevalent than the incidence of extreme abuse would indicate, the expression of infantile rage against the one who hurt us, that is the great secret. This is another piece of the great puzzle of life that falls into place when you work from the premise that punishment is violence.
The culture of punishment in which we live has turned the most natural, organic beautiful thing in the world, mother love, into a violent act, and one which brings a terrible vengeance to the half of humanity we should all hold sacred, our mothers. Now to blame. Women, putting the blame for misogynist violence on men isn’t working; stop spanking your sons. Men, you’re not fixing it either. Stop making your women “correct” your sons. This is the issue. Violence breeds violence.
The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. Women, your safety, the safety of your daughters and grand-daughters is in your hands. Hurting kids, dishing out unpleasantnesses, damages them, it doesn’t help them, and it doesn’t help women. Help your kids, help yourselves, give up your punishing ways. Love looks like love, and it doesn’t invite revenge.